True Chip Till Death

About True Chip Till Death

Hola true bitlievers, and welcome to the TCTD release of the week 2011! Stan Lee intro now out of the way, we must delve back into the wonderful world of free chipmusic on the interwebs, and we have a gooden this week. During our hiatus there was a intersting post on the Chipflip blog (whose author Goto80 we have featured before), who brings up an intersting point about what free chipmusic means now, and what it meant in the 90's.

His point was that the origional hacker ethos of the chipscene was based on open source module exchange where the distribution method itself allows you to explode the source file in its origination software and see what samples the user created, and how the song was made. He then went on to write:

"But like Education of the Noobz says in his new release, ”open source” music has a long history as a sort of folk music. “Before professional games, before cracker intros and before demos, home computer users were peeking and poking around their machines’ memory in search for the addresses the soundchip would react to”. Flip through any computer magazine around 1980 and you will see BASIC-listings of pop-songs and classical music. They were open source by default, since they were distributed as code to be executed by the listener. Sort of like mod-files, and very much like previous hacker music as found in e.g HAKMEM and Creative Computing in the 1970s, or elsewhere in the 1960s."

Dragan is a foudning member of the insane/hilarious/awesome folk duo Bodenständig 2000, and whose music can be found in many free music archives like MOD Archive and HVSC. The difference between those releases in the older file formats and the newer "Education" release is a degree of of real world production that you could never get in the raw files.

As a musician, I find source files interesting but perhaps the great majority of listeners simply want to hear the songs. Post what you think in the comments, and check out the release cuts below. See you guys again in seven!

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Comments

I just wanted to point out that the "real world production" mentioned in the article is documented in the source files, for example, how the piezo sounds were recorded. For the UpItUp/FMA release, my friend Simon V did the final mastering, so that the tunes sound nice even if a Dr Luke record was played before. Simon V started out as a tracker, that's why I knew he would understand the material, and I also asked him because he documents his process: http://simonv.com/tutorials/mastering.php